Monday, July 28, 2008

Divisible by eight

One hundred and twentyThe surprise refund I got (or, technically, have been promised will be deposited in my checking account) from the IRS last week. As you may recall, in April I got a letter from the IRS informing me I owed them almost $5,000 in unpaid taxes, fees and interest on the more than two-year-old rollover of some underperforming mutual funds into an IRA account. Three weeks, 100+ pages of cost-basis documentation and $600 in tax attorney fees later, I sent a check to the IRS for $1,100—along with a couple pages of detailed tax-attorney math—instead. And last week—FINALLY—the speed demons at the IRS sent me a letter informing me that I'd in fact overpaid and I should be expecting a $120 deposit in my checking account sometime in the next century. Which, if you're going to get a delinquency letter from the IRS, is the best kind to get.

SixteenThe number of miles we ran Saturday morning. And by "ran" I mean "staggered pathetically through." As always, I blame the heat. But not as always, I wasn't the only one who choked.

Here is my pace group before the run, filled with confidence and innocence and hope:Here we are around mile 7, when I'd started falling back so much that people felt compelled to run back and get me:

Here's Matthew coming out of the bathroom near our turnaround. I'm including the picture here because Matthew thinks he looks good in it. And because Matthew totally went potty!And here's a picture of our finishers. Notice who's not among them. I mean besides Dick Cheney:At our turnaround, I decided to run at a pace I could handle and wait for a slower pace group to catch up with me so I could join them. Unfortunately, I discovered I couldn't keep up with three successively slower pace groups. So I plugged along and ran the last five miles on my own. I did finish, but I clocked in a good half an hour behind my peeps.

One halfThe number of my nipples that started chafing before the run was over. I have always been the miracle boy who never sweats and rarely has chafing issues ... and suddenly on top of my exhaustion, discomfort and prolonged wall-hitting Saturday morning, my right nipple started to feel like it was about to be rubbed bloody by my shirt. I'm sure part of the problem is my nipples were laser-hard in my last mile ... along with the goose-bumpy skin all over the rest of my body as I started into the early stages of heat exhaustion. But I was also wearing a moisture-wicking running shirt that was dripping with sweat and water. And—to me, at least—moisture-wicking shirts are more scratchy and irritating than cotton. Which is as welcome as a gay in a Vatican bathhouse among true runner circles. But I like the gays, so I usually run in cotton.

In any case, I took my shirt off for the last mile, something I haven't done since 1) I turned 40 and 2) I started wearing a heart monitor, which I think looks as ridiculous as a divorced Republican presidential candidate at a "family values" rally. Of course, Matthew was waiting at the finish line with his camera, so now there's a photographic record of what I look like with a broken headlight and an electric chair restraint holding up my moobs: